Electrospinning for developing flame retardant polymer materials: Current status and future perspectives

Polymer processing techniques have experienced continued progress over decades to meet performance requirements in diverse applications. In the same period, various high-performance polymeric materials have been developed rapidly. Fabrication of polymer fibers has been in the center of attention from the origin of synthetic polymers, with applications ranging from textiles to biomedical materials. Electrospinning is a well-known process for developing continuous fibers with diameters of tens of microns to hundreds of nanometers. It benefits from special privilege of in-situ modification/functionalization of polymers and nanoscale materials. Flame retardancy is an important performance characteristic of polymer materials. Both material and fabrication aspects have to be taken into account when designing flame retardant polymer materials, but the latter has been rarely dealt with by researchers. This review attempts to categorize state-of-the-art features of flame-retardant polymer materials developed by using electrospinning. Electrospun fibers of natural and synthetic polymers used in developing flame-retardant materials were reviewed and their mechanical properties, advantages and challenging aspects were discussed.